- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2155
I read Waste Land because it has had positive reviews from at least one history academic and a senior military figure, David Petraeus. I was very disappointed. Kaplan’s logic twists and meanders, his winding arguments and assumptions often lack historical and political support. At times his conclusions are incorrect. A book for those wanting to ward off their insomnia, otherwise to be avoided.
The title “The Waste Land” comes from TS Eliot’s poem, with Kaplan using imagery of desolation and spiritual crisis to frame the modern fractured and overheated politics of the present. He travels through the American Southwest exploring its military installations, prisons, and abandoned towns as metaphors for what he sees in the USA: isolation, militarisation, ecological exhaustion, and the collapse of civic society.
Kaplan’s views the present great-power rivalry as “an interconnected system of states in which no one really rules.” That’s true as far as it goes, also so vague as to be useless. He argues that the world’s precarious state is similar to Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s; a state in permanent crisis. Kaplan highlights how the economic fragility and political polarisation of the Weimar era is mirrored in today’s rise of populism and the erosion of trust in state institutions. It is an argument supported only by Kaplan’s precarious leap in logic.
Kaplan critically explores how modern technology and digital media amplifies global fragility. Modern communications, he claims, have created a “closeness” that people formerly did not experience, ensuring local conflicts quickly become global. “Complexity leads to fragility” making our world more unstable, and making conflict riskier and pervasive, than in the past.
Kaplan’ goes on to argue that the US faces “decay in the culture of public life” and that as “the media has become less serious, so have our leaders.” He compares President Dwight Eisenhower to President Donald Trump, whom Kaplan calls “the epitome of self-centered, emotional impulses.” Russia’s decline is “in a far more advanced state of rot” than the US, whose decline is “subtle and qualitative,” while Russia’s slide is “fundamental and quantitative.”
Kaplan’s politics takes an anti-left turn. He contrasts China’s Deng Xiaoping with Xi Jinping, who he calls “a Leninist ideologue” who has returned China to a “die-hard authoritarianism.” Kaplan shows little understanding of Marxism, equating Communism with fascism. Kaplan’s arguments at times are illogical. He says that both the USA in 2020 and Russia in 1917 “demonstrated the phenomenon of genuinely liberal people socially intimidated into supporting movements to their far left.” If one is far right enough, Joe Biden could be to their “far left,” but I fail to see how votes for Biden were like the Russian Revolution.
